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Ubuntu 11.04 May Still Get Nouveau Gallium3D

12-02-2010, 07:40 AM

Phoronix: Ubuntu 11.04 May Still Get Nouveau Gallium3D

Canonical has been using the Nouveau DRM/KMS driver since Ubuntu 10.04 LTS for providing 2D acceleration and kernel mode-setting for NVIDIA hardware on an open-source driver by default, but they haven't yet shipped the Nouveau Gallium3D driver that would provide OpenGL acceleration support (along with OpenVG, OpenGL ES, and the other APIs accelerated by Gallium3D state trackers). Their reasoning for holding back on shipping the Nouveau Gallium3D component by default (though it is available through an experimental package) has been that the upstream Nouveau developers haven't yet declared it stable and are unwilling to take bug reports against the driver. Canonical though may be in the process of reevaluating their Nouveau Gallium3D decision and this 3D driver could end up appearing in Ubuntu 11.04...

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is there anything wrong with the nouveau guys?
i recall it was linus himself who had to force nouveau code into the kernel, because the devs didnt want to. and there was some rant against gallium. is it under such heavy and deep developement that people dont want to see any bug reports? imho it seems to be a step forward and putting pressure on the intel guys to give in their classic code. And the sooner everyone gets hacking on gallium code the better.
Provided there is no serious fault in gallium code. And im not sure if the rant against gallium is connected to jGlisse, mentioning a mesa rewrite... (please comnent on it, whether there might be any connection)

by the way. recently i had ubuntu 8.10 running for a while and the intel i915 driver was incredibly fast.
id like to see a benchmark of ati, nouveau and intel in the discipline:
UMS vs. KMS! (just the latest possible code for each)

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Basically it is possible to switch from nouveau to nvidia binary in most cases. Compared to fglrx which basically locks up 99% when you try to unload radeon + kms modules this is possible with nvidia. That means you could install nvidia in live mode when you booted with kms - most easyly using my script inside screen.

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Basically it is possible to switch from nouveau to nvidia binary in most cases. Compared to fglrx which basically locks up 99% when you try to unload radeon + kms modules this is possible with nvidia. That means you could install nvidia in live mode when you booted with kms - most easyly using my script inside screen.

Has it actually been fixed? Last time I tried that was with the Ubuntu Lucid live CD, and trying to switch from nouveau to the Nvidia blob made an ugly mess. It would always ask me if I wanted to switch to "low graphics" (VESA) mode, but then use Nouveau instead when selected.

It did work in Karmic and earlier when switching from the nv driver to the blob, but that's not surprising since nv didn't use KMS.

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live, be sure screen is installed I would not recommend this on a U hd install, debian is ok, with u kernel (also u mainline) it is possible without -m but basically you don't need dkms in live mode - would only need a bit more time. I had similar code ready for fglrx but fglrx crashes all the time...

The reason why this script should not be used on U 10.04 or newer is that it does not use the u packageing with the new update-alternatives overrides. In live mode it should not hurt anything so feel free to try.

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is there anything wrong with the nouveau guys?
i recall it was linus himself who had to force nouveau code into the kernel, because the devs didnt want to.

The real reason that Linus wanted nouveau in the kernel is that he bought Nvidia hardware, and was stuck with having to use out-of-tree drivers. (The pretense was that Red Hat shipped nouveau code already.)

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The real reason that Linus wanted nouveau in the kernel is that he bought Nvidia hardware, and was stuck with having to use out-of-tree drivers. (The pretense was that Red Hat shipped nouveau code already.)